When I first got into indie rock, I knew so little about it (or anything else) that I would sometimes pool my lawnmowing money to buy a new album based only on the echo the band’s name made in the empty cave of my imagination. That’s how I first came…

What is more embarrassing than writing about the music you don’t intellectually love or or ethically love but actually love? Is there a way to write about music without lying? How can anyone not listen to music in the car? What does a lullaby in a language you don’t know…

As if from nowhere, Gillian Welch (along with guitarist David Rawlings) appeared in the late nineties singing new songs on old guitars about the same people who live in the songs of the dark forested heart of old, weird America: farmers and orphans, drifters and barroom girls. There was something…

1. I didn’t set out to write so much about zoos. The story I published in American Short Fiction a few years ago titled “The Zoo and The World” began because I drove cross country for the first time, from Baltimore to Oklahoma City, and I wanted to write about…

I’ve been teaching James Baldwin’s essay “Notes of a Native Son” in different kinds of classrooms for almost twenty years. As material for contemplation of America and Americans, past and present and future, it is inexhaustible. As a model for writers, or for anyone trying to understand and communicate a…

I’d like us all to take a step back and take a deep breath before we move ahead with a more formal assignment. None of what’s happening in the world right now is familiar; there is much to fear. Nevertheless, here we are, suddenly in an online writing course together…

The classic “creative writing workshop” scene is familiar: an apprentice writer sits silently, listening to her story being torn apart by vengeful classmates while an all-knowing professor oversees the savage action, offering occasional unpredictable but authoritative cutting remarks. More and more, creative writing teachers and students are questioning this model…

Though it was spring, there was a chance of freezing rain, and storms. I knew I would have to drive the not-quite-two-hours from Oklahoma City to Ada that afternoon through the weather, half of it across open land on sweeping thin roads with too-high speed limits, no doubt a white…

I decided to keep a sort of journal over the few weeks of winter break. Each entry had to begin with something happening in the moment or in memory and had to proceed without knowing where it was going, and it had to end. Ten lines of ten syllables each. — The neighbor’s sycamore loses its leaves Into our yard, a gift and mess, pale Yellow and papery, each the size of a Hand, a dead hand, a dream of hands. Gray sky In evening deepens abstractly, thinking. Winter is outside, light is light only In the dark. Bare branches allow being Looked through. Dryness, loss of leaves…